President Donald Trump’s much-hyped speech promising huge revelations about interference in the 2020 election failed to deliver. On Thursday night, the president made sweeping claims about interference by China and cover-ups by the “deep state,” and repeated debunked claims about noncitizens voting. He pointed to a document drop on the White House website as proof, though the files didn’t contain evidence to back up his assertions.
For Trump’s loyal army of followers, this didn’t matter. “This is a grand slam from President Trump,” election denier Patrick Byrne told school shooting conspiracy theorist Alex Jones moments after the speech ended, adding: “This is bigger than if they released the JFK files.” (Byrne failed to mention that the Trump administration did release the JFK files last year.)
Jones added during the broadcast: “The deep state is shitting a brick right now.”
Conspiracy theorists claimed the speech would provide the basis for Trump to enact the Insurrection Act, a law that could allow the president to deploy the military to the polls in November, though the range of the military’s legal capabilities in a situation like this remains unclear.
Lara Logan, the former CBS news reporter who has become a star in the election denial community, called the speech “a reckoning” and wrote on X that it was “the opening salvo in a much bigger plan.”
That plan, according to many election deniers, has already seen Trump push Congress to pass the anti-voting SAVE America Act, and, if that fails, invoke even greater powers.
“Trump has the optics to do whatever is necessary to secure the 2026 midterms, to include invoking the Insurrection Act to secure polling locations with Military and Federal Law Enforcement,” a member of the election denial group called Sarasota Patriots wrote on Telegram.
“After Trump proves that he exercised every option before going the Executive route, he will invoke the Insurrection Act and save the Republic,” Jacob Creech, a popular conspiracy theorist known online as WarClandestine, wrote on X.
Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator and well-known election conspiracy theorist, shared Creech’s post, writing: “This is what’s called ‘laying the predicate’ and it is EXACTLY what’ll happen. You’re watching it in REAL TIME.”
Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who has been at the heart of the election denial movement, called for immediate arrests, without citing any evidence beyond Trump’s words. “The CIA and NSA directors during his first term should immediately be arrested for treason,” Flynn wrote on X.
This is exactly what experts who have been closely tracking the election denial movement expected.
“Tonight the White House ran a tired playbook: cherry-picked intelligence and a flood of raw, discredited reports, dressed up as a national security revelation, to build a pretext for lawless action,” says Alexandra Chandler, the director of impact programs at nonprofit Protect Democracy who worked in the intelligence community for 13 years. “This wasn’t about 2020 or national security. It was about deputizing the foot soldiers who will be asked to deny the 2026 results if their side loses in November.”
The speech and document release was met with anger from election officials and voting experts. “This is all bullshit,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state, wrote in an emailed statement to WIRED. Maryland congressmember Jamie Raskin, a former House impeachment manager, told Zeteo that Trump’s speech was “gibberish,” “drivel,” and “almost self-debunking.”
But possibly the most damning condemnation of all came from inside the Trump administration. John Solomon, the conservative journalist known for challenging the narrative around Trump’s ties to Russia, was recently appointed to a role within the White House to review documents that the administration claimed were related to election interference. (While Trump didn’t mention Russia’s role in election interference in his speech, Russia was cited in the documents released by the White House in an assessment that Russia was the only country trying to meddle in American elections in 2020—by targeting former president Joe Biden.)
